I'm fiddling with a story that has an annotator. You know,one of those secondary unreliable narrators who add notes to what purports to be the main narrative, arguing with it, subverting it, sometimes amplifying it. Just to make it more complicated, the main story is itself a lexicon, a collection of entries on an alien culture.

In my original thoughts, both the lexicographer and the annotator were male, two standard types of literary academics, one more flamboyant and fraudulent, one more nervous and obsessive. But I always like to try out different alternatives, and one would be to change the sex of one or both of these characters.

But, somehow, the obsessive annotator seems to naturally come down as male. At the moment, I can't figure out if that is just literary convention, or actually says something about the male neurophysiology. I'm inclining to the "it's just convention" position, since there are certainly many autism-spectrum women, obsessively detail-oriented women, narcissistic "this is about me, isn't it" women, etc. But, in my experience, while they certainly act as unreliable narrators, they more rarely appear as annotators. Maybe Amy Dunne, the wife in Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl, can count as an annotator, though not in a strict technical sense.

Could Kinbote be female? This is the kind of thing I think about when I can't sleep, which was certainly true last night.